‘Sawtooth’ betting pattern could help online gambling sites to spot addiction

Gambling addiction is a concern for online betting operators, who are committed to responsible gaming policies, but have little to no direct interaction with their customers. New research published in the journal International Gambling Studies outlines one potential way to recognise problem gambling quite easily, based on members’ wager sizes.

The ‘sawtooth’ wagering pattern described by a team of Italian researchers is based on real-life data from Bwin, and predicts that site members who are suffering from a worsening gambling addiction will gradually increase their wager sizes in pursuit of ever-bigger thrills, or in an attempt to recover earlier losses.

Ultimately, their wagers will reach an unsustainable level, leading them to run out of money, and at this point their wager size will rapidly drop to a very low level; in turn, as their economic situation begins to recover, they will often begin to bet larger amounts once again, repeating the cycle.

This alternating slow upwards curve followed by a rapid drop gives the characteristic sawtooth pattern described by the researchers, consisting of ‘ramps’ and ‘crashes’, which they claim is a better method of looking for instances of problem gambling than some of the statistical methods that have been proposed in the past.

‘Sawtooth’ gambling pattern, Adami et al, ‘Markers of unsustainable gambling for early detection of at-risk online gamblers’. International Gambling Studies, February 2013.

When applying the pattern to real-world data, combined with a count of the number of different games played by each Bwin member on any given day, five groups of bettor types appear: heavy bettors, high intensity bettors, high frequency bettors, moderate frequency bettors, and moderate bettors.

Heavy bettors wager large amounts frequently across a high number of different games; high intensity bettors, by contrast, wager large amounts but do not appear to play very often. High frequency bettors demonstrate the opposite behaviour, playing often but wagering fairly small amounts.

Moderate frequency bettors play regularly but with fairly low and consistent wager sizes, while moderate bettors – the group that most online players fall into – play least frequently, again for low and consistent wager sizes.

Of all these groups, it is not the heavy or high intensity bettors who demonstrate the greatest number of sawtooth events, indicating that many high-rollers can afford to fund their lifestyle, and do not suffer from anything that could be described as ‘problem gambling’ in economic or social terms.

The middle group, however – the high frequency, high sawtooth bettors – have a significantly higher prevalence of sawtooth events in their betting patterns, as well as one of the highest figures for the number of different games played by each individual, suggesting that these are the players who are most at risk of developing a problematic pattern of gaming.